Cage: I Tried To Put In A Choice Each Time It Was Possible; There Won’t Be Smoke & Mirrors in Detroit

Detroit: Become Human was showcased once again during E3 2017 by Quantic Dream, demonstrating how the studio’s signature choice & consequence mechanics have been pushed forward after Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls.

After the show, Quantic’s Dream Founder and Detroit: Become Human Director David Cage talked with the Official PlayStation Magazine (OPM) UK. The brief interview was published in the latest #138 issue and has Cage explaining the complexity of writing a game like this one.

I tried to put in a choice each time it was possible, and see where it would lead me. It was really scary in the writing process, because you end up with charts and diagrams that end up looking like hell.

This sounds even more complex when you consider that Detroit: Become Human’s script ultimately turned out to be over 2K pages long, as Cage told Geoff Keighley during E3 2017.

Cage also clarified in the interview with OPM UK that he wants to have real consequences, even if that means potentially sacrificing scenes altogether during a single playthrough.

It was important for me not to use smoke and mirrors, because in this genre it is every easy to do it and say this choice has tremendous consequences but really it doesn’t. It had a cost in production to say ‘Okay, we’re going to produce scenes that maybe 20% of the players will see in their first playthrough, but let’s do it, because that 20% will talk about it with someone else. They will compare their stories and realize they are totally different.’

Detroit: Become Human is due for release exclusively on Sony’s PlayStation 4 in 2018, likely in the second half of the year. The plot will be focused on three androids: Kara (played by Valorie Curry), Connor (played by Bryan Dechart), and Markus (played by Jesse Williams). All of them will be playable and may die at any point in the story and the game will progress accordingly.